Koppitz’s emotional indicators and the human figure drawing: A comparison between a clinical and a school sample

Abstract

One of the instruments most used in the psychological evaluation of children is the Human Figure Drawing (HFD), which has several scoring systems. The Koppitz Developmental Scale is one of the most known and used worldwide, in which the presence of maturational indicators for the evaluation of the child’s development and of emotional indicators is verified to determine impairments in this area. A review of the literature has indicated that although many studies used the HFD, there is controversy regarding these indicators. The use of this technique justifies the relevance of this research. The objective of the current research was to investigate the items proposed by Koppitz, which aim at assessing emotional difficulties, by comparing a group of children who sought psychological counseling to a control group without mental complaints. The sample was of 74 children aged 6 to 11 years, who sought psychological treatment with various complaints, and a control group of 74 students matched by age, sex and type of school without emotional challenges. The application was individual and occurred in the care clinics for the first group and in the schools for the control group. The results signified that emotional indicators help to distinguish children with emotional problems; in general, their drawings were affected by these difficulties, which contributes to confirm the validity of HFD for psychological evaluation in Brazil.